I photographed HTC-Columbia cycling team member Mark Renshaw for the latest issue of Cycle Sport Magazine; a super-quick speedlight portrait in a very cramped hotel room just prior to the team presentation at the Tour Of Switzerland. I arrived on location at the team’s hotel with Cycle Sport staff writer Andy McGrath nice and early so we’d have plenty of time to scout the location and work out a shot-plan. Unfortunately HTC-Columbia were staying at what must be the only hotel in Switzerland without a chocolate-box view; just a motorway and some pylons… Any options we did have ultimately went out the window though after meeting with the team’s PR, who initially had some trouble tracking down Mark and eventually found him on the massage table in his room. ‘Do we have any time constraints?’ we asked the PR. ‘No, none at all. Oh, but Mark has to be on the team bus by 7:15PM’. A glance at our watches reveals that it’s already nearly 6:20PM… By the time the interview is wrapped up and Renshaw climbs off the massage table I realise that there’s no time to move outside so I grab a Nikon speedlight and a Lastolite Ezybox softbox and move into the small space left by the soigneur as he kindly folds up the massage table and moves it to one side while Mark grabs another top to wear. Ran through a few different expressions/options before Mark apologised for not having more time and legged it out the door for the Tour of Switzerland team presentation. Mark Renshaw can currently be seen leading out Mark Cavendish at the Tour de France and is widely regarded as the best lead-out man in the business; it’s a tough career decision to forego your own success and personal glory however and it’ll be interesting to see if he does eventually step up to winning races for himself.
Tear-sheet from the new edition of Arts+Culture magazine featuring one my portraits of Devon based Anglo-Chinese artist Clem So. I blogged about experimenting with a Holga toy camera on this shoot at the time which can be viewed HERE plus here’s some more unpublished out-takes from the shoot below.
The new issue of Cycling Active magazine is on sale this week featuring my work on the cover from a recent cover shoot assignment for them plus a couple of bike test features that I shot for them also. Outdoor sports cover shoots like this one can be a bit of a headache from a logistical perspective as typically there’s a long list of things that need to be pulled together and criteria met, and while I can organise most things the one thing I have no control over is the weather. Blue skies were on the list which are probably easy if you live in California but here in the UK they’re not quite so common plus we’re blessed with some of the most unpredictable weather in the world so you can never rely too heavily on the forecast. This shoot was originally planned a week earlier than the eventual shoot date; models, location, bikes, and clothing were all arranged but I woke on the morning of the shoot to heavy, dark, 100% cloud cover despite the original sunny/blue skies forecast so we had to postpone. A few days later we were hit with a heat wave and of course my models weren’t available… I couldn’t risk missing the window in the weather so a couple of emails were sent out and new models and location were found in Cornwall; weather was incredible this time without a single wisp of cloud in the sky, but it didn’t last too long with cloudy skies back a couple of days after so I was relieved to have gotten the shoot in the can. Big thanks to Bike Chain Ricci for all of their help and to cover model Chis Opie who can normally be found at his day job riding for the Pendragon/Le Col/Colnago cycling team.
I love any assignment that involves travel, but the truth is that I don’t normally get much time to take in the local culture when working on assignment. It’s sort of like a ‘taster’… And I do have a mental list of places I’d like to go back to with more time to explore and enjoy. Last week I was in Switzerland for a few days working on a magazine assignment and I did actually feel like I got to see quite a bit of the country; mainly thanks to the 300km drive from location one to location two through the Swiss mountains which made for a pretty interesting day.
Work location one: 32 degrees
Swiss motorway; beats the hell out of the M4
Hire car at 2478 metres above sea level at the Nufenen Pass and temperature now at four degrees
Quite a lot of snow still considering it’s June
View from the front of hotel two; back to hot with humidity thrown in for good measure
Room without a view
Big thanks to writer Andy McGrath (my travel companion for this trip) for shouting at me every time I drove on the wrong side of the road (hard to break that habit…).
If you happen to find yourself on board a BMI Baby flight anytime soon you’ll see a feature in their Yeah Baby in-flight magazine’s current Summer issue that I shot for them on location at Watergate Bay near Newquay on the north coast of Cornwall a few weeks ago. The shoot happened to coincide with a short break already long planned at the Headland Hotel (location for the 1990 film adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The Witches) in Newquay on that weekend so when I got the email from the magazine’s Picture Editor I jumped at the chance to mix a little business with pleasure.
Despite visiting Newquay a few times over the years I’d never previously been to Watergate Bay just down the coast. It’s a pretty unique beach; very wide and completely flat; the sort of beach which which lends itself very well to kite buggying although there were none on the beach while we were there. As with most outdoor shoots the weather was a worry and we anticipated a disaster first thing as we woke to black skies and intermittent rain and of course the client wants blue skies. This time we got lucky though and the sky soon brightened with some beautiful diffused light coming through the early haze and the sky got bluer as the day went on. The assignment was to include portrait and documentary photography of the people either work or leisure on and around the beach including the team of RNLI life guards, Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen restaurant which overlooks the bay, and the surfers competing in the 2010 English National Surfing Championship. Big thanks to Yeah Baby’s Picture Editor Julia Holmes for assigning me, to Art Director Julia Murray for doing such a great job with the layout and image selection, and finally to Editor Ginny Cummins for being such good company on location and making the whole shoot seem easy.
A tearsheet from the current issue of Runner’s World featuring a photo I shot for the magazine’s double page ‘Rave Run’ section. The location is on the north Cornwall coastal path near Bude (the GCHQ satellite base can be seen on the horizon on the right hand of the frame). We shot at a few different locations across the section of coastline until finding this spot which was about a half-hour hike from the nearest car park. I’m not normally a big fan of tripods but I had decided to experiment with shooting some panoramas to try and give a sense of the space and terrain. The final full pano featured below is a total of 14 vertical frames (shot with a 24mm lens); obviously the image had to be cropped to fit the full bleed double page spread format but it still provides a unique super-wide angle perspective plus lee-way for positioning within the page.
My first experiment with video; I bought a Nikon D90 a while ago for shooting video and as a (relatively) compact back-up body and this is my first attempt. The few things I’ve learnt while making this video so far include; editing video is really (really) tedious, syncing the vocal track is a complete pain, and I really don’t like being on that side of the camera. Clearly I have a lot to learn but I really like the cinematographic quality that you can get with the new HD-SLR bodies and although I don’t plan to make anything too involved I am thinking about the potential to produce some short vignettes if and when time allows.
One of my band portraits of the Plymouth based group Brotherhood Of The Lake made it into the current issue of Rock Sound Magazine available now from all good newsagents… The band’s new album ‘Iron Sails” will be released on June 28th 2010 and gets a glowing write up by Rock Sound, stating: ‘we promise you won’t hear as many records as good as this in 2010…’.
A few photos from an ongoing personal project about Motorcycle Speedway. I remember my Dad telling me stories about his Friday nights spent at the local speedway track as a spectator way back before he was married but I don’t think I ever went to a meet prior to starting work on this project. All of the images were shot on location at the Plymouth Devils speedway team’s home track at the Saint Boniface Arena in Plymouth.
